Best tips & tricks to widen sound

Cubase
1

I was wondering, what is your favorite way to stereo widen a sound.

Myself i use a chorus, or duplicate channel and pan 100% left & right. In the past i used S1 Imager from Waves but i dont like waves so much anymore.

Any tips and tricks. I am very curious what you guys are using! :+1:

2
  • Brainworx bx_stereomaker to widen the stereo image on final mix.
  • Record same parts twice, almost same but slightly different performance and pan left and right.
  • soundtoys microshift when i dont have recorded twin files and need that effect
2 Likes
3

Unless you are further processing the 2 Channels so each side is different this will mostly make your panorama more narrow. If the source material is mono then this should result in a mono signal. If it is stereo it should move the edges closer to the center. In either case, depending on your Pan Law settings, this can also increase the final signal level which typically sounds ā€˜betterā€™ to us humans.

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4

Can only recommend ā€œWiderā€ to expand mono or narrow sources. It does kind of a Haas effect, but magically without causing any phase issuesā€¦itā€™s free:

For the master bus i sometimes use K-Stereo by UAD, very subtly though.

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5

context - dynamic wideness of panning changing over the course of the track. A small delay using voxengo simple sound delay: Precise Audio Delay Plugin [VST, AU, AAX] - Sound Delay - Voxengo can work wonders. Dan Worrall has a great video about this

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6

IMO it depends on your source audio. In other words, the tool or process will depend on what you want to widen.

For synths, sometimes as mentioned above, recording a 2nd track as close to the 1st, then panning for big and lush and definitely not fake.

If you want to subtly ā€œthickenā€ vocals, very common in the last decade, and I mean not even close to chorus effect, and not microshifting, I use Cloner and sometimes Stage 1 after it. Chris Selim has a great tutorial explaining Cloner and vocals.

Electric guitars, a ton of tools.

S1 can work for a lot of material, but if you push it very far, I would suggest listening in a mastering room for unnatural artifacts. The same goes for Brainworks BX Stereomaker. A bit more subtle than S1 and Stereomaker would be Bob Katz Precision K Stereo which still gets quite a bit of use here.

@TobyShark love that procedure!

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7

On a mono signal, I simply use the Steinberg MonoToStereo plug-in as insert, with a stereo track to receive it : works great, on a guitar recordingā€¦

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8

Much more options to look into! Thanks guys